Reading Academic Literature

Our task is to take on an academic paper and dissect it! Ideally, the paper will be of interest to us personally, and we are to summarise its findings. At the same time, we are to record the process of finding the paper, and make a judgement call on the paper’s validity or worth.

I am particularly interested in the integration of technology with people – in particular I am interested in ways that the people can naturally interact with technology to derive immediate benefit. The Natural Programming group at Carnegie Mellon are devoted to this, and sum it up nicely:

We are taking a human-centered approach, first studying how people perform their tasks and then designing languages and environments around people’s natural tendencies

John F. Pane has extensive background in computer science, with a particular flavour for educational paradigms (I apologise to JF Pane for the gross generalisation here – but would qualify this with the incredible amount of work he has done to shift education methods into more efficient and relevant applications). JF Pane has studied and worked at Carnegie Mellon and is currently a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, Pittsburgh, USA.

This paper has been cited 151 times (Google Scholar) and JF Pane’s other publications have been cited over 1000 times, half of which have been in the past 5 years. For comparison I searched for articles and citation records of two academics, NE Dixon and G Otting, whom are both exceptionally well respected researchers in their fields. Citations of NE Dixon’s work was of a similar order to JF Pane’s, and that lends strength to the level of support of JF Pane’s work. While the number of citation for G Otting’s work were significantly higher (ranging from approx. 200 – 600 citations per paper), this is perhaps indicative of his exceptional academic standing.